


Deliver Me

by beautifultoastdream



Series: Carolina Dreaming [1]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Brain Damage, Character Study, Couriers have a hard job, Decapitation, Drama, Gen, Memory Loss, Rules, Slight canon deviation, Speak softly and carry a Broad Machete, Violence, came back wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:55:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29166051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beautifultoastdream/pseuds/beautifultoastdream
Summary: It's not a surprise that a wasteland courier was the one to upend the whole world. The surprise is that it took this long.A study of a brain-damaged Courier Six who remembers almost nothing ... except the hard-and-fast rules a courier has to live by. Turns out that it takes a hell of a person to deliver the mail in the Mojave.
Series: Carolina Dreaming [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2149269
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Deliver Me

**Author's Note:**

> My first whack at New Vegas fanfic, so please excuse inconsistencies. But while playing it for the first time, strolling along lonesome highways before being ambushed by murderers and giant venomous flies, I started thinking what a crazy job this was. Imagine trying to deliver a package in a world infested with radscorpions and cazadores! Mojave couriers definitely don't get paid enough. 
> 
> So I developed the Couriers' Rules, based on what someone would have to do in order to survive in the wasteland long enough to complete a delivery.

They said, later, how it was strange that a courier did it.

A courier. A messenger. Someone who was there when you needed them and not there when you didn’t. Someone who carried packages and letters and, if you had a particularly trusted one, payments. A name on a list, if they had a name at all.

They said she must have come back … _wrong._

Totally understandable if she did.  Shot in the head, buried in a shallow grave. Who wouldn’t come back wrong after that?  Those who knew her well—the very few of them—would, after a sufficient number of drinks, tell you that the woman didn’t even remember her full name or her family. Just scraps.

Came back wrong. That’s the only explanation, for why a simple courier would tear th e balance of power to pieces and build a new independent Mojave on the remains.

No one bothered to ask another courier their opinion. Th at courier  would have said: I’m  not surprised it was one of us. Wh at surprises  me is that it didn’t happen sooner.

* * *

She is twenty-eight years old (possibly) and her name is Carolina (probably).  She’s a courier with the Mojave Express, and some one in a terrible suit shot her in the head. That’s all of what she knows  about herself.

Doc Mitchell says the memories may return. There’ll be bits and pieces, over time, coming back.  Some  may turn up right away, some never will .  It’s a miracle she retained this much, considering what happened.

The doc is kind. He reminds her of someone … Someone she can’t remember. 

This is going to be difficult.

For a few days, Goodsprings is home to a ghost. She covers up the bandages with a bandanna and lends a hand around town, helping Sunny Smiles reduce the local gecko population and  making up batches of healing powder for the doctor.  She fixes Trudy’s radio, even though she doesn’t remember  exactly  how.  These are simple, rote tasks, things she thinks she once  did : her hands  know the motions even when her brain  does n’t . 

Curious, though, that her hands don’t remember a rifle.  She fumbles with it. Terrible shot. Those hands prefer the machete that Victor found in her grave.

Victor seems nice. She goes to chat with him, to thank him for bringing her to the doctor. The rest of the town seems not to trust him, which Carolina can understand, but … being rude doesn’t seem right. The thought makes her frown, sending a jolt of pain through the still-healing stitches on her brow.

It takes several days, and several dead Powder Gangers at her feet, before Carolina begins to learn about herself again. 

She doesn’t like being rude. She doesn’t like to steal. Taking caps and packaged foods from dead, burned-out houses is one thing; that’s salvage, and someone else will take it sooner or later. Breaking into shops or telling nasty things to people that h aven’t hurt you —those are all just species of rudeness, and she doesn’t bear with that.  She tries to get along without drawing too much attention, without hurting anyone.

But she remembers the Rules.

W hen the Powder Gangers come to town, she decapitates the first one with the backswing of a machete, kicks his corpse into a gully, and charges the second, heedless of the gunfire streaking over her head.

**Courier** **Rule** **Number One: Don’t rely on a weapon you have to reload.**

Guns should frighten her. She remembers the tremor, the sheer pants-pissing fear of the gun pointed at her face. Knowing what was about to come. But perhaps she was always reckless, or perhaps the part of her brain responsible for retaining that fear  was destroyed. 

She doesn’t tell the good folk of Goodsprings that she’d just as soon as not dealt with the Powder Gangers at all. For her money (all twenty-eight caps of it), she ought to have left the whole situation lie. It was her debt to Goodsprings, and its doctor and its robot, that put her against them. 

**Courier Rule Number Two: No friends, no enemies. You have to go everywhere, so don’t give anyone a reason to stop you.**

Well, now the Powder Gangers have a reason. They don’t end up being the  only  ones .

What n ext ? What should she do?

She learns faster now. As she contemplates her position and the last of the bandages come off, she looks at herself in the reflection of her scratched Pip-Boy screen and learns something else: she is  angry .

Whatever answers she used to have, whatever she used to take for granted about herself and her life—gone. Only muscle memory and the Couriers’ Rules left to guide her. Platinum chip be damned: she wants to find the men who killed her, and she wants answers. And she intends to treat them with the same grace and kindness with which they treated her.

This, then, is who Carolina is. Speak softly. Be kind. Help others. Grant mercy. Get along. But when they turn on you, when they use up their chances, send their heads rolling.

She doesn’t like it. There’s no joy in killing a man. But if it has to be done, she does it.

She sets out for Primm in the morning. Word is that the fellow in the checkered suit passed that way, and she means to have words with that boy.

* * *

**C** **ourier Rule Number Three:** **No matter what you’re carrying, someone else wants it.**

She reflects on this as she squats on the floor of the Dino D ee -Lite front office, her stomach in knots.

Jeannie May Crawford. Carolina had had her suspicions of the woman. No, it wasn’t anything special, no kind of sixth sense or great deep knowledge of human nature: just something about how Jeannie May couldn’t say enough good about that man Boone and enough bad about that man’s wife.  Couldn’t say enough good about her little town, and enough bad about people who didn’t like that same town.

Civic pride? Or a spinster with her eye on a handsome soldier?  Pick one.

Between the Fiends, the Gun Runners, and the people desperate to swap anything at all for a cap, there’s always someone who wants what you’re carrying. The Legion, too, but it likes a certain kind of cargo best. Carla Boone had been carrying something the Legion would pay for: herself and her child.

Carolina doesn’t have a dog in this fight. Technically. She hadn’t said a word to the man with the dead dog on his head, back in Nipton,  even though she longed to say a whole mess of words about exactly where he could shove his precious Legion .  One machete (Rule Number One) isn’t much good against a whole horde of angry men with guns, and she (Rule Number Two) didn’t care to make enemies.  The Legion  is powerful. 

But Carla Boone is dead, and there’s a grieving widower with a sniper rifle up there,  desperate for answers. 

**Courier Rule Number Four:** **If the situation is bad, don’t make it worse.**

She can let it go, not get involved (Rule Number Two), and walk away. Leaving behind a town guarded by a man slowly losing his mind with sorrow, and a desk clerk who sold one person and might do it again. Or she can put on a borrowed beret, ask Jeannie May Crawford out for a midnight stroll by the dinosaur, and keep the situation from getting worse.

Just like cards: Four beats Two. 

* * *

** Courier Rule Number Five:  Even if you’re empty-handed, you still carry information. **

Veronica is a sweet girl, but she gets on Carolina’s nerves.

Sweet _girl_? Veronica can’t be but a few years younger than Carolina, can she? Or is the “twenty-eight” lodged in Carolina’s busted-up brain all wrong? Perhaps it’s just Veronica’s energy, her eagerness and talkative nature, that make Carolina feel like she’s dealing with an out-of-control child.

(Is she a mother? She can’t remember.)

It’s as much for her own relief as for Veronica’s education that she starts explaining the Courier’s Rules and her own methods.  It’s been  two  month s , now, since she left Goodsprings, and she’s sorted out a few more things. Made good earnings. Learned some interesting little tidbits. 

Even made a couple of allies, to set against the enemies she’s racked up among the Powder Gangers, the Legion, and the Fiends. Even the Jackals, whoever they are, are after her. Poor Rule Two has taken quite a beating. Fortunately, Rule Five steps up to help balance the accounts.

Information is one of the best packages you can carry. It weighs nothing and can be delivered—and sold—over and over again, to all sorts of different clients. And because you never know who might want to know what, a good courier makes it her business to learn as much as she can.

So she veers off the road to investigate shuttered gas stations; overnights on dirty mattresses in abandoned trailer parks, rooting through the garbage for clues as to who’s been here; collects the star caps, even if she doesn’t give two shucks of a maize ear for any Old World prize.  Where there’s a rumor, where there’s a story, where there’s news—there’s pay.

Veronica is Brotherhood stock. She understands that knowledge has worth.  But there’s more knowledge out here than can be found just grubbing about in old machines, and Carolina collects as much of it as she can.  Some day, she’ll find the right piece, and fill in some of the holes in her mind.

* * *

** Courier Rule Number Six: Don’t  lose focus . You have a job to do. **

Rule Number Six, much like Courier Number Six, is broken to pieces.

She has no official delivery to make, aside from the one-off jobs she picks up here and there. Her client is herself; her job is to find answers.  S till, s he  loses focus .

Boulder City is a wreck.  She can’t begin to imagine the chaos that happened here, but she still stumbles over burned-out Ranger corpses in the wreckage. In obedience to the job she has to do, she goes to meet with Jessup of the Great Khans.  He gives her a few scraps of information and tells her to either bribe the NCR for his freedom or fuck off.  He doesn’t even blink at the machete in her hand. Perhaps he remembers it from when they buried her.

The sight of his sneering face makes Carolina lose her focus.

The Khans die hard. When she comes out of her daze, the edge of her machete has been dulled by chopping bones. The captured NCR troopers are freed, and have the courtesy not to say anything about the blood-spattered courier undoing their bonds. She apologizes for taking too long. For losing her focus.

She keeps Jessup’s bandanna and wears it over the scars.

* * *

**Courier Rule Number Seven: You’re never alone, no matter where you are.**

Veronica laughs when she hears it. “Never alone? Not even out here?”

They’re walking along a cracked pavement between a dry lake bed and a towering cliff face.  Their only company is courtesy of the radio: unlike men, money, and memories, Johnny Guitar will never leave you. 

“ Never,” Carolina says. “Ever.”

Veronica smiles. “This is starting to sound mystical. Do you mean God? Because the Brotherhood … We  focus on different stuff .”

“ No, not God.” If she had a deity, a faith, she doesn’t remember it. “It’s simpler than that. Remember Rule Five?”

“Information. Right. You always carry information.”

“Rule Seven is the other side of that.” Carolina looks up at the cliff face. “Anyone could be out there. Anyone could want what you’re carrying.  Packages they can just steal, but information … There’s a lot of different ways they can get information out of you.”

Veronica’s voice is soft. “Is that why you hate the Legion so much?”

No, that’s a simpler matter. In obedience to Rule Four,  Carolina chose not to make Nipton’s situation worse, and she took an NCR sniper with a gift for headshots on a walk near a place that just so happened to contain a Legion slave camp.  The only survivors were the Powder Ganger captives, but somehow, the Legion still found out that she was responsible.  Now the y  want her dead. As this is extremely rude of them, Carolina  responds in kind.

Poor Rule Two. We hardly knew ye.

“ No. I don’t have any history with them.” That she knows of. “ But they’re just the kind of people to do that kind of thing, if they want what you’re carrying. So never get sloppy or let your guard down.  You n ever know who’s watching you.”

“ Or if they might be someone  _ rude.”  _ Veronica smiles at that. She’s heard Carolina mention that word several times now. “Is that in the Rules too?”

“I don’t think so,” Carolina says at last. “I think … I think that’s one of mine.”

* * *

**Courier Rule Number Eight: A customer is a customer is a customer.**

It’s not good business to discriminate. If they have the caps, or any other form of currency, they should be able to hire a Mojave courier.

As she travels, as she searches, as she learns, Carolina takes jobs from anybody. If they aren’t currently trying to kill her and they want a courier, she’ll  hear their proposal . The desiccated corpse of Rule Two provides an out for jobs that are too  _ rude  _ to take: if they want an assassin, a kidnapper, a thief, she politely refuses. But she does not refuse them the chance to offer it.

It’s easier to explain her growing band of allies—contacts—backup—handlers— _ friends _ if she hides behind the shield of Rule Eight.  A customer is a customer.  A client is a client. If they are clients, and not friends or allies or a growing crowd of voices behind her as the death toll climbs and  the world shifts and  people begin to talk of what she is doing, then she has not broken another of the Rules and the world continues to make sense.

She snaps, once, when Cass is too deep in her cups and questions the Rules. 

“ It’s a crock of brahmin shit,” is Cass’s opinion.  Carolina says something  surprisingly unfriendly and absents herself from Cass’s company for the next few hours.

Perhaps things were easier, before Goodsprings and the graveyard.  Back then, she must have had more to build herself on: family, friends, memories.  She must have known whether Carolina was her  first or last name.  But whatever else she had then is gone, and the only thing she has to build her world around are the Rules and an ever-present conviction that thieving and killing are not just wrong but  _ rude. _

Sometimes she looks around her and wonders if her former self would have taken on such a wide array of … clients. Raul expects scorn from humans; Lily, poor loving lost Lily, can’t even go near many settlements. She numbers among her clientele an NCR sniper, a former Enclave doctor, a Brotherhood of Steel mechanical genius,  a robot, and a drunk.

Who was Carolina, before Goodsprings? Would she be sitting here, eating a gecko steak by a campfire, as the ghoul complains to the sniper about the doctor cheating at cards? Or would it have been too rude for her, too?

There aren’t enough pieces left of her to make a person. So she fills the gaps with the Rules and pushes on.

* * *

**Courier Rule Number Nine:** **Time is money. Don’t waste it.**

She respects Rule Number Nine. Her days are full of work. A new client, Colonel Dhatri of the NCR, gives her a job: to acquire, and courier to him, the heads of three local Fiends. 

She does not like taking killing jobs. She is a courier, not a mercenary. But she has previously heard tales of what these three Fiends have done—particularly the big one, Cook-Cook, who did what was done to Corporal Betsy.  That  sort of  behavior is completely unacceptable. The boy needs to be taught a lesso n, and it is well within her power to deliver that lesson to him.

With Boone a silent presence behind her, she takes her machete into the ruins of old Vegas. Twelve hours  nets her three heads, and an inordinate number of other Fiends who attempted to interpolate their opinions into the matter at hand.  They were not permitted to do so.

Carolina delivers three packages at once. It’s uncivilized to let heads bleed all over the interior of one’s pack, so she takes an empty metal box from a shelf in Cook-Cook’s hideout and couriers the heads that way.  It’s a good thing they finish up in the middle of the night: the Mojave sun would bake the delivery like three prize hams if she had to carry this parcel in the middle of the day.

She delivers the heads to Dhatri.  It takes all of her willpower not to ask him to sign for it.

Job done. Package delivered. She catches a few hours’ sleep on a mattress in the corner of the First Recon tent. 

Boone doesn’t talk much, but she knows that he, too, understands the value of not wasting time. She can hear him talking, low-voiced, to the other snipers, trading information.

As she falls asleep, she finds herself thinking that Boone understands Rule Five. He would make a good courier.

* * *

**Courier Rule Numb** **e** **r Ten:** **Whatever happens, be professional.**

She speaks softly. She answers kindly. She runs errands for others, accepts reduced payments, fetches a little girl’s lost teddy, and watches the Legion burn.

And at the end of it, with an independent Mojave rising from the ashes and an army’s worth of notches on the hilt of her machete, she reports to the nearest Mojave Express office.

They stare when she walks in. One of them drops his coffee mug. It shatters on the ground. She kneels down to pick up the shards, drops them into a wastebasket, and walks to the dispatch desk.

“ I’ve finished,” she says. “What’s my next assignment?”


End file.
